Becoming a Hub
My engineer friend, Dave, recently described me as a hub to another friend. I was startled at his title for me--a hub? What could he mean? And was that a good thing? Or did that mean I was self-centered and in the old slang of my southern childhood-- stuck on myself? Self-centered? For a Boomer of my age and a woman growing up in the stifle yorself 1950s, being self-centered, if you were female, was the WORST!
Or did he mean that I drew people to me as a connector? With a clarifying email, I was relieved to know he meant a connector. (Or as my brother recently said--you think about yourselfl, but you are not selfish. Thank you, Bro!)I like that idea. I like the notion of being a connector. Being a connector in this fragmented era is a good thing. We homo sapiens are a community--group oriented species. And finding our way in all the dislocations and disconnections of contemporary society can be a challenge.
So what can being a hub mean to us?
The Wheel of Life and Its Hub
I think back to my childhood, with its multiple relocations and dislocations.We lived in two states and six towns between my ages of four and eleven. We lived in seven apartments and houses. My brother and attended around eleven different schools. With each move, my mother got a better and better job in education. And with each move, my social connections were broken. Only one partially survived. And what grounded us was our big extended family that was located in central NC.
When finally one of my uncles told my mother he was tired of moving us we came back to our hometown and stayed there. I ultimately went off to college and NYC and many years of peripetatic living until this past decade.
My life has turned on a wheel that had me solo (or at times feeling that way)--for the most part-- as its hub. And as I am assured that is a sometimes good thing. Rolling along, living in many places and environments, traveling world wide, moving in many circles of disparate people, has built a core of strength and hopefully some little understanding and I hope, some humility.
Each A Hub for LOVE
Each of us is ultimately a solo hub at the center of our own lives. And so it is our connector potentiality that can serve us and our communities best. How can we connect ourselves with others in meaningful ways? Who can connect with us? And if we center our hub in our hearts, then we become a hub for love.
It is a delicate balance--meeting the need sof others and seeing to our own interests. But that iws one way that being a hub of and for love is stabilizing. Remember the old gyroscope toy http://scientificsonline.com/category.asp?c=424589&sid=google&cm_mmc=google-_-cpc-_-edmu-_-gyroscope&gclid=CIOmg93D-JgCFQFvGgodDCswnA&bhcd2=1235593893that was so popular in the late 50s and early 60s http://www.howstuffworks.com/gyroscope.htm? Well, this device is important to balance and navigation. Planes use them. All sorts of machinery that needs dynamic balance use them.
What makes them unique is that they are multi-dimensional wheels, at the core of which is a hub for balance. With out that ability to be dymanic and fluid, the gyroscope fails.
In a similar way, each of us is a delicately balanced human "gyroscope" with our hearts at the hub and that enables each of us to roll through life connected.
Become a Human Hub
What are the connecting lines that come into your life? Is it a friend who has been injured and needs a meal delivered. Is it knowledge you have, that you can share to support another? Is it a skill or many skills you have that could link with another to develop a new business, support a local NGO, make a child feel stable.
We have no need to be afraid in these times. We are all connected in the http://www.pyramidcollection.com/itemdy00.asp?T1=PL3205big wheel of life and in our individual ones.
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